Goodbye Geocities: On Archiving Websites

In 1996 I created one of my first homepages, a tribute website to the Canadian band Eric’s Trip. I was able to claim a beautiful Geocities url: http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/3500/

It’s one big piece of pure nostalgia and 1996 web aesthetics: Photoshop flares, optimized for Netscape and hand-coded with HTML Notepad. The Last Update JavaScript stamp reads 08/30/1997 18:50:02 but I haven’t updated the page since 1996. The stamp says 1997 because Geocities used to insert advertising which would fool the script into thinking the page had been updated.

ASCII and the Archive Team have started to archive Geocities and the progress is described in ‘Geocities: Lessons So Far.’ There are two great applications to backup your own, long forgotten, Geocities website:

• PC: Website Ripper Copier
• MAC: SiteSucker (Thanks Daniel Rehn!)

I now host The Unofficial Eric’s Trip Homepage on this webserver, have a look at my 1996 design skills (watch your steps: broken links, hint: choose l0-fi). PC World wrote a great nostalgic article on the end of the Geocities era: ‘So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed‘

Esther Weltevrede, my colleague at the Digital Methods Initiative, will be talking about Archiving Web dynamics at the Archive 2020 meeting which I will blog about for Virtueel Platform. Looking forward to it!